Firefly completes historic moon mission
Portions of Firefly Aerospace’s lunar lander Blue Ghost are visible in this image, with a waning Earth in the distance. Photo courtesy of Firefly Aerospace
Firefly Aerospace’s lunar lander, Blue Ghost, completed its 14-day research run March 16, the first moon mission for the Central Texas space firm and the first-ever fully successful commercial moon landing. Firefly, which has a manufacturing site in Burnet County, aims to make annual trips to Earth’s largest satellite and has more NASA missions on the horizon.
Blue Ghost landed on the moon March 2 after a 45-day trip from Earth’s surface that began Jan. 15. The company has now set the bar at 14 days for the longest commercial operation on the lunar surface.
“This team continues to make near-impossible achievements look easy, but there is no such thing as an easy Moon landing, especially on your first attempt,” said Will Coogan, Blue Ghost chief engineer, in a March 17 media release from Firefly. “We battle tested every system on the lander and simulated every mission scenario we could think of to get to this point.”
The lander and its suite of instruments transmitted 119 gigabytes of data during its mission, which lasted a little over one full lunar day, equivalent to 14 Earth days. Among Firefly’s key achievements on the mission were the successful use of GPS satellite tracking and navigation, proving that sensitive electronics could withstand space radiation, drilling into the moon’s surface robotically, and capturing images of a solar eclipse from the moon’s surface. The trusty lander, by design, powered down following the lunar sunset.
While Intuitive Machines was the first commercial company to get a lander to the moon in February 2024, that mission was somewhat botched when the lander, Odysseus, reportedly damaged its landing gear and toppled over, compromising its ability to effectively gather data.
Blue Ghost’s successful landing and mission are historic achievements, and work is already underway on Blue Ghost Mission 2, scheduled for 2026. It will be the second in a series of NASA projects for Firefly in the U.S. space administration’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.
“We’re incredibly proud of the demonstrations Blue Ghost enabled from tracking GPS signals on the Moon for the first time to robotically drilling deeper into the lunar surface than ever before,” said Firefly CEO Jason Kim in the Monday media release. “We want to extend a huge thank you to the NASA CLPS initiative and the White House administration for serving as the bedrock for this Firefly mission. It has been an honor to enable science and technology experiments that support future missions to the Moons, Mars, and beyond.”
Firefly Aerospace is headquartered in Cedar Park and has a 200-acre manufacturing and testing site in Burnet County near the community of Briggs. That site, known as Rocket Ranch, has over 300 employees and is set to expand in the coming years.